This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the disclosure. Accordingly, these statements are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is or is not prior art.
Recently, owning to the technical advances in robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly popular in many application domains. While UAVs/drones are currently successfully deployed for military applications, their adoption and availability in commercial and civilian domains are currently hindered by its high cost and limited functionalities. The last few years have seen successes of commercial applications emerging in aerial video photography, toy/game and monitoring/surveillances. Functionalities of those systems, however, are still limited to remote control by human and simple point-to-point navigation, and the cost is too high as well. In the meantime, the mobile industry is one of the most rapidly-developing industries, which brings down the cost of portable mobile devices with increasing functionalities. A true disruptive wave of innovation will be facilitated if mobile robotics system (including UAVs) can fully take advantage of what the mobile industry has to offer. The low cost of computation, hardware, and connectivity offered by the mobile industry will be truly beneficial for mobile robotic industry (UAVs included). Moreover, the supporting resources and infrastructures, such as cellular infrastructures and GPS satellites are already available for UAVs to tap into. Therefore, there is an unmet need for the hardware and software integration of mobile device and UAVs and commercialization of the achievable functionalities.